


A Way Forward

by SeveralSmallHedgehogs



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 2 (Critical Role), Gen, Pining, Whump, but not the romantic kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26602045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeveralSmallHedgehogs/pseuds/SeveralSmallHedgehogs
Summary: The dinner, from Astrid's point of view. What strange people.
Relationships: Astrid & Caleb Widogast, The Mighty Nein & Caleb Widogast
Comments: 12
Kudos: 182





	A Way Forward

**Author's Note:**

> this is another sort of sketch/character study. time for metaphors

Astrid’s hands were not cooperating. She stood in the mirror and adjusted her collar, willing herself to be calm. But her fingers still trembled.

“It’s just dinner,” she murmured in Zemnian. “Bren will bring his friends. It will be all right.” She would not have to watch Trent Ikithon break him again. Surely his friends would take over when the first cracks appeared. It would be all right. It would be all right.

Her face in the mirror remained pale, but she schooled her expression. Straightened her back. She was Trent Ikithon’s student, after all. It wasn’t that hard to pull on the mask.

As she took a seat at the table and Bren pointedly sat next to her, her mind returned to the day that he came to visit her at home. It had been the first time she’d seen him in person since he left the sanatorium. Right from the second he laid eyes on her, she’d been able to see everything he was thinking painted across his face. He used to be better at hiding his emotions, she’d thought.

They had both remembered that weight of Trent’s expectations from their training. She could see it bending his back, even then. When she tried smiling, tried to remind him of why he was chosen in the first place, the look he gave her had been awful. The betrayal, the silent, _How could you?_ She hadn’t had an answer for him. How could she? Because she had to. But he wouldn’t take that answer.

When they first lost him, the night he killed his parents, she’d expected Trent to be furious. Bren had been been the star student. But the quiet acceptance had almost been worse. It told her that Trent still had plans for this broken, mad boy whom she loved. The thought of it had made her want to shudder, at the time. What more could he possibly take?

In the end, her talk with Bren had been short and disappointing for them both. They were magnets with the same alignment, too similar and too opposite to do anything but reject each other.

With the rest of these people, though, he was different than he had been alone. Astrid still saw the heaviness, but his back straightened. The people around him drew him out. And she could see why—they were a truly fascinating group. The tiefling girl, bright and bubbly and so easily insidious. The expositor, sharp-eyed and watching. The halfling, glaring, protective, a little petty, perhaps. The dark-haired warrior who seemed less threatening than she likely was. The half-orc who spoke little but seemed to know more than he let on. And the firbolg. Gods, the firbolg. With his slow smile and weird eyes.

And it struck her, how quickly and… “cleverly” was a strong word. Decisively. How quickly and decisively they gained a foothold in the room. Separating Eodwulf from her and Trent was an interesting move. She could see that it hadn’t been planned, but it was certainly coordinated. That sort of split-second teamwork took an intense kind of familiarity and trust between the people executing it.

Trent knew when to let out the line, and he did so here. He seemed amused, at best, by the group’s attempts at subterfuge. He already knew the answers to the questions he asked. It was a technique she recognized, and she was sure that Eodwulf and Bren recognized it, too. Trent wasn’t looking for information so much as he was checking to see what they hid, and how they hid it. It would give him a reference point for later questioning in a less friendly setting.

The tiefling did most of the talking, at first, which surprised her. Then again, Astrid got the idea that this young woman was used to casual lies. Nearly everything she said seemed to be a lie, but it was difficult to tell whether she was concealing the information out of spite, or out of shrewdness. It might have been both—after all, Bren must have told them about his teacher.

So, following Trent’s lead, she fell into the old habit of cataloguing information from their expressions. The dead volstrucker in Rosohna was not news to them, and judging by their reactions, they had likely had something to do with her demise. Bren fished for information on the Empire’s next move towards the Dynasty. At least now she knew where their loyalties were.

When the tiefling asked Astrid about her hair, she warmed slightly. She’d never paid much attention to her hair, and hearing it mentioned was… nice. Until the girl made it clear she wasn’t bringing it up as a compliment. Astrid decided not to feel anything for it. Then, in the space of another coin-flip, the girl was all enthusiasm again. And the Expositor, of all people, complimented Astrid’s tits.

Astrid felt as if they’d grabbed her shoulders and spun her around in a circle, but she didn’t let it show. They were too much to keep up with. This was not what she’d expected from them. She’d already gotten the idea that Bren’s friends weren’t so much for calculation, but perhaps that was because they didn’t need to be. They were creatures of impulse. And it worked.

Or, it worked until Trent decided to start digging his claws in. Everything he said was something she’d heard before. She and Eodwulf didn’t have Bren’s potential. They’d had that drilled into them from week one of their training and she’d long since stopped letting that rankle.

Instead, she took a deep breath and let the words wash over her. She’d known what Trent would say to Bren, but having to sit and listen to him say it, to see the look on Bren’s face, on his friends’ faces, was something else entirely. When it had been just her and Bren talking, it had been easier to face this system and point out the good in it.

But it was something different to listen to Trent now. To be aware of these people on the outside looking in. To realize that Bren had become one of those people on the outside. Looking in at her and Eodwulf still standing with Trent Ikithon.

And somewhere in her mind, she was deeply and quietly envious. She’d always envied Bren. Trent’s favorite student. Even after he was broken. Part of her had resented him. The other part pitied him. How many pieces could a man shatter into before Trent decided he was useless and let go of him?

She’d prepared herself to watch the breaking all over again. But now, as they spoke, she saw something that startled her. She saw, in Bren and his friends, a complete rejection of Trent’s ideas. The old man had started this conversation ready to talk in circles around them until they were so dazzled that they didn’t know which way was up. But when he started to explain how what happened to his students was a good thing—the training, the tests—these people didn’t believe him. They met each other’s eyes across the table. The expositor made a face like she smelled something rotting and silently shook her head.

And they all watched Bren, but none of them tried to catch his eye. Perhaps because they saw that he couldn’t seem to look away from Trent.

“This is why I am not dead,” Bren said at last, his tone difficult to read.

Trent smiled. “Of course,” he said, patronizing, a teacher happy that a student finally understood a lesson. “If we wanted you dead, there would have been no escape. And I cannot tell you how proud of you I am. We are.”

Whatever the Expositor smelled, the firbolg seemed to smell it, too. The halfling woman was watching Trent so intently and with such hatred, Astrid thought she might be imagining what it would be like to put a crossbow bolt between his eyes. She wondered what it felt like to let one’s emotions show so plainly. What a privilege, to be allowed to feel.

Astrid had imagined what this meeting would be like. What sort of expression Bren would make when Trent laid all these cards on the table. She’d expected the disgust from his friends. They were outsiders, they didn’t know. They didn’t carry Bren’s potential. If they had, Trent would have been speaking to them, instead.

She’d been swayed by Trents words before. Many, many times. She knew what it was to listen to him tear your doubts apart, piece by piece, and stitch together the certainty, the purpose, the importance of what you were doing. Afterward, she’d be able to find the seams, but she didn’t want to rip them out again. And then she’d stopped noticing them. His teachings blended perfectly. She’d hated that. She’d embraced it.

Bren’s reaction was what she’d feared it would be. What she’d half hoped it would be. He leaned away from Trent, instead of towards him. His head turned slightly away. Like their old teacher was something too awful to look at directly. She knew that Trent had been expecting to get into his head. To pick at the edges, find a loose thread and pull. But it wasn’t working, so far. She didn’t know how long Bren would hold out.

And then Bren looked to her. She hadn’t expected him to be able to do that. She smoothed her expression, but she could tell from the look in Bren’s eye that he’d seen her worry. She couldn’t bear to listen anymore, but what else could she possibly do? She willed her face to go blank. She imagined Trent’s words as wind, intangible, inconsequential. She only had to sit and endure it.

Bren was still watching her. She could not let him see through her again. “Whatever it takes to keep the people of this empire safe,” she told him, loathing every word as it left her lips. “The wants of one do not outweigh the wants of many.”

She wanted so badly for him to nod. To shake his head. To do something. She wanted something out of him, anything other than this look of sadness. Even to her, her voice sounded weak. Pleading. “Right?”

Trent leaned forward on his elbows, and Astrid braced herself again. “When talent rises from nothing,” he said, “then nothing truly is lost.”

Movement drew Astrid’s eye. The dark-haired warrior and the Expositor had caught each other’s attention across the table. The warrior looked to be somewhere between disbelief and horror and fury. The Expositor had a harsh smile on her face, like she wanted to either laugh or scream. Or both.

And Bren—Caleb—held their teacher’s gaze. He had never been good at eye contact. When they were younger, he’d confessed to her that it felt too vulnerable, and at the same time too invasive. He’d only ever met people’s eyes when he had no worry about what they would see there. He’d met Astrid’s eyes when he told her he loved her. He’d met prisoners’ eyes during interrogations. He’d met Eodwulf’s eyes when, one day in their mid-teens, Eodwulf had admitted that he wasn’t sure he could continue the training.

“This is for the good of the empire,” Bren had told him, one hand on his shoulder, his gaze pinning Eodwulf in place. “It is for the good of our people.”

Now he held Trent Ikithon’s eyes and Astrid saw that he no longer had anything to hide from this man. This was open contempt for their old teacher, and he wanted them all to see that. He openly talked of pulling Trent Ikithon up by the roots. The expositor called Trent disgusting in a voice too loud for her to possibly think they couldn’t hear her.

Down the table, Eodwulf nervously took another bite of his food.

Astrid fell back onto training. Onto old answers. She recited by rote memory.

“When we last spoke,” Bren said to her, “I had the impression that you were being groomed for this seat.”

Ice washed through her veins. Out of her corner of her eye, she saw Trent lean forward with interest. This was information she had not wanted revealed to him.

“My ambitions,” she said, ever aware of her teacher’s attention, “and the paths laid before me, are not always… congruent. Bren,” she added. _No more,_ she tried to tell him silently. _Not here._ The urge to wipe her palms on her suit was difficult to ignore.

Trent’s reaction might have been genuine. Or perhaps he’d already known. Of course he’d already known. He knew everything. Unwaveringly. Infuriatingly. Astrid’s hatred for him was fresh, always fresh, a knife wound that was opened and reopened every day until she accepted the agony. She could see that Bren’s anger was deeper inside his skin. A healed-over piece of shrapnel. One might not always be able to see it, but it was always there. He always felt it.

Bren said to her, “This way is not the only way.”

He talked big about what the empire could be, and she could see that he meant it. But Astrid could see that Bren had dreamed of killing their teacher for the clean and simple reason that he wanted Trent Ikithon dead. There was no extracting him from that.

She barely noticed the expositor take a bite of her food, the first bite she’d taken all night. Then she caught the tiefling’s attention and told her, under her breath, to eat as much as she could. “Before we get kicked out?” the tiefling hissed back. The expositor nodded and they both dug in.

Astrid hadn’t noticed her view being crushed down to Bren and Trent until she suddenly realized again that there were other people in the room. She took what felt like her first breath in several minutes as Bren looked around at his friends.

“I feel like I have been dominating the conversation,” he said. They all made noises of denial. When he noticed the tiefling shoveling food into her mouth, bizarrely, he smiled.

The half-orc spoke up for the first time that night. “How many more beacons do you have?”

The tiefling choked. Astrid was briefly glad she hadn’t been eating; she probably would have done the same thing. With that, Bren’s new friends easily picked up the weight of the conversation. The firbolg outright asked Trent if he’d ever answered a question directly. The Expositor snickered.

Now that Bren had stopped talking, Astrid had the distinct feeling that his friends had been unleashed on the old teacher. The group of them made each other laugh. Trent regained his hold on the conversation a few times, but he rarely kept it for long.

“What if I want to be a sailor?” Bren asked him.

“That is your choice.” Trent knew, Astrid knew, Bren knew that he would never choose that. Bren would not have come this far if he didn’t intend to see this through. If he wasn’t already so entrenched in magic that he couldn’t possibly extract himself from it. Or it, from himself.

The halfling buttered a piece of bread, put another piece of bread on top of it, and took a bite. What a strange way to eat.

“But you won’t,” said Trent, his attention ever fixed on his prize student.

Bren’s friends were gesturing to each other over the food. Astrid didn’t know how the group of them could possibly act like this while Bren was still facing off with Trent in this way. Did they truly trust him this much? And Bren, how could he possibly focus so intensely through all of this?

“No,” Bren admitted. “No, I won’t be a sailor.”

There wasn’t much more after that. Bren made noise about leaving, and the others piped up in agreement. Astrid let out a breath. It was over. Everyone was more or less where they started.

Then Trent started to get up, and the firbolg leaned forward in his seat. He was smiling gently. Astrid thought she saw a hint of something sharp in his eyes, but everything else about him was so soft, so slow—she’d heard his responses to Eodwulf’s inane questions—and she stupidly let the thought drop as he began to speak.

He offered Trent Ikithon a gift. Told him that he was a fool, and that pain did not make people. He said that love made people. And something in her, something that sounded too much like Trent, was incredulous. Love? Love did nothing for the world. Love was cute, a luxury like sweets or soft clothing. She remembered when she loved Bren so fiercely she thought they would conquer anything. The years had stripped anything like that away from her. Love was not pointless, but it was useless.

 _But look at Bren,_ something else whispered. _Caleb. Look at them all. Look at the way they see each other. Look at how they stand._

“I wish you would find, in the future, someone who will mourn you when you’re gone,” the firbolg said to her teacher. The dim voice in her head shouted again. Mourning was beside the point. They were silent heroes of the Empire. They did not expect parades and grand funerals. They did what they did for the good of the empire and its people.

But something else whispered that, if Bren died today, he would be mourned. These people would mourn him. She’d heard of what the Mighty Nein had done. She’d heard how they touched people’s lives—not from the shadows, but out in broad daylight for all the world to see. How odd that must feel. How wonderful.

If she died, who would mourn her? Not Trent. Maybe Eodwulf. Bren—Caleb—certainly would. She hoped he would. She wondered whether his friends would mourn her with him. For his sake. Sympathy was something she was no longer familiar with.

Selfishly, she hoped someone would mourn her.

Trent only looked at the firbolg. He was not smiling. For the first time that night, Astrid could tell that he had nothing to say. No retort. No way to twist this man’s words back at him. He wasn’t here for this. He didn’t have the same tight grip here that he did on Bren. And she saw the warrior biting her lips, the firbolg still smiling, the half-orc and the expositor and the halfling all openly grinning. Bren sat, arms crossed, watching. Eodwulf sought reassurance from her, and she did not give him any. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to.

Everyone in the room could tell that Trent Ikithon had no control in this exchange.

It was terrifying.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Good night,” Trent said. And he vanished.

Wulf tried to flee—the longer they spent with these people, the worst the association would be—but Bren and his friends managed to corral him. He looked to Astrid again for some indication of what to do. Whatever he saw in her expression, he seemed to take it as permission. They agreed to walk Bren and his friends through the courtyard.

As they walked, the tiefling slipped her arm into Astrid’s as if they were schoolgirls. It struck Astrid as something so pointless and it should not have warmed her heart the way it did. An owl hooted nearby. Astrid knew who it was and she didn’t look up at it, but the Expositor made a rude gesture. Astrid wondered how she could possibly tell that that was Trent. She wished she had the nerve to do that.

Someday, she would.

“I’m sorry if you thought I was giving you hard time earlier,” the tiefling whispered. “I thought you were mean like Trent but now I’m feeling really guilty about it, because I don’t think you are, so I want to apologize if I came across as rude. I feel very bad about it.”

Astrid lowered her voice. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I have done.”

“Well, I know some of what you’ve done. And I know that Caleb cares deeply for you, so, you can’t be all bad.”

Astrid wanted so badly to find out what these people would make of her. Bren had to have told them his entire past—he would not be this easy with them if he hadn’t. What would it be like to show them her own ugliness, her bloody wounds, with the certainty that they would accept them? What would it be like to feel that safe with another person?

She’d seen what they’d made of Bren. A friend. A great wizard in his own right. Caleb Widogast, a man, whole and real.

What could they make of her, if she let them try?

Eodwulf pulled a bottle of alcohol out of the air and took a swig. Bren held out a hand, and Eodwulf handed it over. It was such an old routine that they didn’t even think about it. Bren passed her the bottle, next. She took a drink and gave it back to Eodwulf.

“You…” Bren was looking at her again. She saw her own longing reflected back to her. “You could come with us.”

“No, I could not—”

“You _could,_ ” Bren insisted. “You could.”

“No, I could not.” She wanted to go with them so badly, but she wanted to stay even more. She could not abandon this. She hadn’t stepped off this path for him all those years ago, and she wasn’t going to do it now.

He finally looked away. “We will be out of the city soon. Don’t know when we’ll be back.”

Thank the Archeart. She couldn’t bear to have him this close. “Yeah. Just be careful.” She wanted to talk more. There was so much to say. But she was also too aware of the shape in the tree above them. Watching. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

The tiefling brightened. “Oh, he’s an _owl_ now. I get it.”

Astrid managed not to sigh, or laugh. Being with them seemed like it would be a constant relief and a constant heart attack. They really did just say what they were thinking, didn’t they?

“We can kidnap you,” the halfling suggested, “make it look like a real struggle.”

She could see how these people had captured Bren’s heart. They were good people. She was glad he’d found good people.

At the gate, Eodwulf spoke again. “That was one of the more interesting dinners I’ve been to.” To the firbolg, he added, “I like you.”

The firbolg smiled. “Thank you. I like you, too. Don’t let that get to your head, he’s—that guy’s a little, oof.”

“Yeah,” Eodwulf agreed. Then, “I would… be careful not to say things to… people like him—”

“Oh, no. If I had to live here, no.” The firbolg shook his head, still smiling.

Astrid wondered where the hell Bren had picked up this particular character. She could tell that he in particular had caught Eodwulf’s attention. Not many people could do that.

Eodwulf opened his mouth to say something else, but he chickened out and left. The tiefling showed Astrid her own Disguise Self spell, drawing another smile. The expositor threw out the offer of a drink, one last time. The impulse to accept was like rough fingertips snagging on fabric; it didn’t affect anything, not really, except to make her very aware that it had happened.

She drew an enormous amount of willpower to decline. She wanted to be with these people. She wanted to talk to them not as Trent’s student, but as Astrid. It had been so long since she’d felt like Astrid.

The half-orc spoke up again. “Funny that he let Caleb go, and not you. Seems… odd.”

“Caleb was always his favorite. Bren,” she corrected herself belatedly. Caleb and Bren were such different people and it felt strange to act like they weren’t. Maybe just in her head…

“Well,” said Bren. Caleb. He offered a smile. “You were always mine.”

She missed him so badly. She wanted to go with him, with them, but she couldn’t. There was work to be done. And she wouldn’t want him to come back, not for the world. Not after she’d seen him like this. Eodwulf had been right; he looked good. Being out from under Trent’s thumb was good for him.

She asked, “You mean what you said in there, right? To stop him?”

“I…” Caleb took a breath. “Yeah. Nothing is set in stone. Not for you, or for anyone.”

She gave him one last smile. “Race you to the top.”

Then she walked away. She had a lot to think about. She’d come into this worried and resigned, sure that it was going to be up to her to remove Trent and his poisoned systems. But she’d seen what Caleb and his friends had done. She’d heard his conviction in there. Their conviction. They worked for justice.

She was not alone, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Follow me on tumblr](https://severalsmallhedgehogs.tumblr.com/) for updates and links to new works/chapters!
> 
> EDIT: Thank you for the comments! I'm glad yall are enjoying reading this, it was good to write


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